Notwithstanding widely-held claims that assessment practices in higher education are relatively static, our understanding of the purposes of assessment and the nature of assessment practices has ...
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Notwithstanding widely-held claims that assessment practices in higher education are relatively static, our understanding of the purposes of assessment and the nature of assessment practices has changed markedly over the past forty years. These changes are a response not only to recent developments in our conceptualisations of student learning but also to the demands a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world places on students. This book contains new perspectives on assessment and feedback provided by world renowned researchers on issues that are currently of great interest to both academic managers and teaching staff, as they try to make courses more effective and more appealing at a time when universities compete for incoming students. Rather than simply sharing recent inventions in assessment and feedback, the contributors to this book highlight the linkages between these innovations and new theorising and/or empirical research on assessment and student learning, thereby offering practices that are not only pioneering but evidence-based.Less

Advances and Innovations in University Assessment and Feedback

Carolin KreberCharles AndersonNoel EntwhistleJan McArthur

Published in print: 2014-07-30

Notwithstanding widely-held claims that assessment practices in higher education are relatively static, our understanding of the purposes of assessment and the nature of assessment practices has changed markedly over the past forty years. These changes are a response not only to recent developments in our conceptualisations of student learning but also to the demands a rapidly changing and increasingly complex world places on students. This book contains new perspectives on assessment and feedback provided by world renowned researchers on issues that are currently of great interest to both academic managers and teaching staff, as they try to make courses more effective and more appealing at a time when universities compete for incoming students. Rather than simply sharing recent inventions in assessment and feedback, the contributors to this book highlight the linkages between these innovations and new theorising and/or empirical research on assessment and student learning, thereby offering practices that are not only pioneering but evidence-based.

Agile Faculty is a faculty development book that introduces strategies to help faculty improve their goal-setting, productivity, vitality, and career satisfaction. To do so, the book adapts the Scrum ...
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Agile Faculty is a faculty development book that introduces strategies to help faculty improve their goal-setting, productivity, vitality, and career satisfaction. To do so, the book adapts the Scrum project management framework popular in software development. Scrum is a framework for dividing large projects into smaller pieces that can be accomplished in a short amount of time. The Scrum roles, meetings, strategies, and terminology can easily be adapted to faculty work in research, service, and teaching, and this work can be individual or collaborative. Faculty often juggle multiple projects and responsibilities including completing research, serving on committees, designing and teaching classes, and mentoring students and peers. Faculty can experience stress when these responsibilities compete for their time. Faculty can benefit from a set of flexible and adaptable strategies to achieve meaningful personal and professional goals. Scrum is considered an Agile framework. Agile is an umbrella term for a set of human-centered project management values and principles. The Agile values of focus, commitment, openness, courage, and respect align with faculty values. Agile Faculty introduces everything faculty readers need to know about the basics of Agile and Scrum and includes chapters with advice and specific strategies to improve how faculty approach different aspects of their research, service, and teaching priorities. The goal of Agile Faculty is to help faculty readers determine their most meaningful personal and professional goals and to use the Agile and Scrum strategies outlined in the book to make regular incremental progress toward their highest priorities for career satisfaction.Less

Rebecca Pope-Ruark

Published in print: 2017-11-27

Agile Faculty is a faculty development book that introduces strategies to help faculty improve their goal-setting, productivity, vitality, and career satisfaction. To do so, the book adapts the Scrum project management framework popular in software development. Scrum is a framework for dividing large projects into smaller pieces that can be accomplished in a short amount of time. The Scrum roles, meetings, strategies, and terminology can easily be adapted to faculty work in research, service, and teaching, and this work can be individual or collaborative. Faculty often juggle multiple projects and responsibilities including completing research, serving on committees, designing and teaching classes, and mentoring students and peers. Faculty can experience stress when these responsibilities compete for their time. Faculty can benefit from a set of flexible and adaptable strategies to achieve meaningful personal and professional goals. Scrum is considered an Agile framework. Agile is an umbrella term for a set of human-centered project management values and principles. The Agile values of focus, commitment, openness, courage, and respect align with faculty values. Agile Faculty introduces everything faculty readers need to know about the basics of Agile and Scrum and includes chapters with advice and specific strategies to improve how faculty approach different aspects of their research, service, and teaching priorities. The goal of Agile Faculty is to help faculty readers determine their most meaningful personal and professional goals and to use the Agile and Scrum strategies outlined in the book to make regular incremental progress toward their highest priorities for career satisfaction.

The book is a collection of essays about ethical issues arising in selective higher education. The chapters, all by distinguished scholars, including one eminent university president, address the ...
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The book is a collection of essays about ethical issues arising in selective higher education. The chapters, all by distinguished scholars, including one eminent university president, address the following issues: what are the proper aims of the university and what role do the liberal arts play in fulfilling those aims?: what is the justification of the humanities; how should we conceive of critical reflection, and how should we teach it to our students?; how should professors approach their intellectual relationship with their students?; how should academics approach the problems raised by social epistemology (like the novice-expert problem) in their curriculum design and pedagogical practices?; what obligations do elite institutions have to correct for the contribution they have made, over time, to racial inequality?; and how can the university serve as a model of justice for its students? It concludes with a brief essay suggesting further avenues for research.Less

The Aims of Higher Education : Problems of Morality and Justice

Published in print: 2015-05-07

The book is a collection of essays about ethical issues arising in selective higher education. The chapters, all by distinguished scholars, including one eminent university president, address the following issues: what are the proper aims of the university and what role do the liberal arts play in fulfilling those aims?: what is the justification of the humanities; how should we conceive of critical reflection, and how should we teach it to our students?; how should professors approach their intellectual relationship with their students?; how should academics approach the problems raised by social epistemology (like the novice-expert problem) in their curriculum design and pedagogical practices?; what obligations do elite institutions have to correct for the contribution they have made, over time, to racial inequality?; and how can the university serve as a model of justice for its students? It concludes with a brief essay suggesting further avenues for research.

Assessment is an important part of effective teaching and learning. It allows achievements to be recognized and helps both teachers and learners to reflect on and review their performance and ...
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Assessment is an important part of effective teaching and learning. It allows achievements to be recognized and helps both teachers and learners to reflect on and review their performance and progress. While assessment has long been an end-of-learning activity to measure what learners can do, the outcome-oriented approach does not always foster learning motivation effectively. A new perspective now encourages ongoing appraisal in the classroom to improve learning. This book reflects current thinking of assessment with a stated focus on assessment for learning (AfL). It informs teachers about the latest developments and provides teachers with important tools for integrating assessment in the classroom. The discussions on assessment theories are in-depth and the examples used for illustrating the concepts are plentiful.Less

Assessment for Learning

Rita Berry

Published in print: 2008-09-01

Assessment is an important part of effective teaching and learning. It allows achievements to be recognized and helps both teachers and learners to reflect on and review their performance and progress. While assessment has long been an end-of-learning activity to measure what learners can do, the outcome-oriented approach does not always foster learning motivation effectively. A new perspective now encourages ongoing appraisal in the classroom to improve learning. This book reflects current thinking of assessment with a stated focus on assessment for learning (AfL). It informs teachers about the latest developments and provides teachers with important tools for integrating assessment in the classroom. The discussions on assessment theories are in-depth and the examples used for illustrating the concepts are plentiful.

This innovative study of the baby boomer generation, who are now entering old age, breaks new ground in ageing research. This post-war cohort has experienced a range of social, cultural, and medical ...
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This innovative study of the baby boomer generation, who are now entering old age, breaks new ground in ageing research. This post-war cohort has experienced a range of social, cultural, and medical changes in regard to their notions of body, from the introduction of the Pill and the decoupling of sex and procreation to the H-Bomb and Earthrise. Yet, paradoxically, ageing is also universal. This exciting book reflects the intersection of time, ageing, body and identity to give a more nuanced and enlightened understanding of the ageing process.Less

Baby Boomers : Time and Ageing Bodies

Naomi Woodspring

Published in print: 2016-02-29

This innovative study of the baby boomer generation, who are now entering old age, breaks new ground in ageing research. This post-war cohort has experienced a range of social, cultural, and medical changes in regard to their notions of body, from the introduction of the Pill and the decoupling of sex and procreation to the H-Bomb and Earthrise. Yet, paradoxically, ageing is also universal. This exciting book reflects the intersection of time, ageing, body and identity to give a more nuanced and enlightened understanding of the ageing process.

Questions regarding whether a first or a second/foreign language should be used as a medium of instruction (MOI) in schools, and if yes, for whom, and when, have been enthusiastically debated in ...
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Questions regarding whether a first or a second/foreign language should be used as a medium of instruction (MOI) in schools, and if yes, for whom, and when, have been enthusiastically debated in recent years in Hong Kong and many Southeast Asian societies. The public debates, however, have largely not been able to benefit from the existing international body of research in bilingual education as well as the educational experiences of other countries. The reason is that such knowledge is often either couched in specialized, technical language or scattered over diverse journals and books, which are often off-putting to teachers, parents, school principals, policy makers and the general public. There is an urgent need to critically integrate and review the international research literature with a view to informing public debates and policy making regarding the medium of instruction in Hong Kong and other Southeast Asian contexts. This book aims at meeting this urgent need by discussing, in accessible language, research findings on key concepts of bilingual education, and recent developments of bilingual education policies in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Teachers, students and researchers in the areas of bilingual education, language policy and planning (LPP), and studies of medium of instruction policy and practice both in Hong Kong and other Southeast Asian contexts will benefit from the book. Government officials and policy makers involved in language policy and planning, as well as school principals, parents and university administrators will also find this book especially useful in providing them with a research-based LPP framework for discussing and studying the pivotal issues in LPP in their respective contexts.Less

Bilingual Education : Southeast Asian Perspectives

Angela M. Y. LinEvelyn Y. F. Man

Published in print: 2009-03-01

Questions regarding whether a first or a second/foreign language should be used as a medium of instruction (MOI) in schools, and if yes, for whom, and when, have been enthusiastically debated in recent years in Hong Kong and many Southeast Asian societies. The public debates, however, have largely not been able to benefit from the existing international body of research in bilingual education as well as the educational experiences of other countries. The reason is that such knowledge is often either couched in specialized, technical language or scattered over diverse journals and books, which are often off-putting to teachers, parents, school principals, policy makers and the general public. There is an urgent need to critically integrate and review the international research literature with a view to informing public debates and policy making regarding the medium of instruction in Hong Kong and other Southeast Asian contexts. This book aims at meeting this urgent need by discussing, in accessible language, research findings on key concepts of bilingual education, and recent developments of bilingual education policies in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia. Teachers, students and researchers in the areas of bilingual education, language policy and planning (LPP), and studies of medium of instruction policy and practice both in Hong Kong and other Southeast Asian contexts will benefit from the book. Government officials and policy makers involved in language policy and planning, as well as school principals, parents and university administrators will also find this book especially useful in providing them with a research-based LPP framework for discussing and studying the pivotal issues in LPP in their respective contexts.

This book examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in two southern states, North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research that explores the ...
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This book examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in two southern states, North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research that explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of that work at the state and local level, and the voices of southerners, including those in rural black communities, the book demonstrate the importance of schooling to political development in the South and challenges us to re-evaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform. Foundation leaders were self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education, efforts they believed critical in the South, and black education was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education that would bring isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schooling served as an important site for expanding state and local governance capacity. It provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and affect black agency in the process. Because foundations could not unilaterally impose their educational vision on the South, particularly in local black communities, collaboration between foundation agents and local citizens was necessary to education reform and had the potential to open political opportunity structures in rural areas. Unfortunately, that potential was difficult to realize because foundations were less effective at implementing programs consistently in local areas.Less

Building a New Educational State : Foundations, Schools, and the American South

Joan Malczewski

Published in print: 2016-11-30

This book examines the dynamic process of black education reform during the Jim Crow era in two southern states, North Carolina and Mississippi. Through extensive archival research that explores the initiatives of foundations and reformers at the top, the impact of that work at the state and local level, and the voices of southerners, including those in rural black communities, the book demonstrate the importance of schooling to political development in the South and challenges us to re-evaluate the relationships among political actors involved in education reform. Foundation leaders were self-conscious state builders and policy entrepreneurs who aimed to promote national ideals through a public system of education, efforts they believed critical in the South, and black education was an important component of this national agenda. Through extensive efforts to create a more centralized and standard system of public education that would bring isolated and rural black schools into the public system, schooling served as an important site for expanding state and local governance capacity. It provided opportunities to reorganize local communities and affect black agency in the process. Because foundations could not unilaterally impose their educational vision on the South, particularly in local black communities, collaboration between foundation agents and local citizens was necessary to education reform and had the potential to open political opportunity structures in rural areas. Unfortunately, that potential was difficult to realize because foundations were less effective at implementing programs consistently in local areas.

Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world’s students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it ...
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Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world’s students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.Less

Building the Intentional University : Minerva and the Future of Higher Education

Published in print: 2017-10-06

Higher education is in crisis. It is too expensive, ineffective, and impractical for many of the world’s students. But how would you reinvent it for the twenty-first century—how would you build it from the ground up? Many have speculated about changing higher education, but Minerva has actually created a new kind of university program. Its founders raised the funding, assembled the team, devised the curriculum and pedagogy, recruited the students, hired the faculty, and implemented a bold vision of a new and improved higher education. This book explains that vision and how it is being realized. The Minerva curriculum focuses on “practical knowledge” (knowledge students can use to adapt to a changing world); its pedagogy is based on scientific research on learning; it uses a novel technology platform to deliver small seminars in real time; and it offers a hybrid residential model where students live together, rotating through seven cities around the world. Minerva equips students with the cognitive tools they need to succeed in the world after graduation, building the core competencies of critical thinking, creative thinking, effective communication, and effective interaction. The book offers readers both the story of this grand and sweeping idea and a blueprint for transforming higher education.

During the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in the United States—a place with a fast-disappearing middle class, ...
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During the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in the United States—a place with a fast-disappearing middle class, persistent pockets of poverty, and striking gaps in educational and occupational achievement along class and racial lines. Low-wage workers and their families experienced a profound sense of exclusion from the techno-entrepreneurial culture, while middle-class residents negotiated both new and seemingly unattainable standards of personal success and the erosion of their own economic security. This book explores the imprint of the region's success-driven public culture, the realities of increasing social and economic insecurity, and models of success emphasized in contemporary public schools for the region's working- and middle-class youth. Focused on two disparate groups of students—low-income, “at-risk” Latino youth attending a specialized program exposing youth to high-tech industry within an “under-performing” public high school, and middle-income white and Asian students attending a “high-performing” public school with informal connections to the tech elite—the book offers an in-depth look at the process of forming aspirations across lines of race and class. By analyzing the successes and sometimes unanticipated effects of the schools' attempts to shape the aspirations and values of their students, the book considers the role schooling plays in social reproduction, and how dynamics of race and class inform ideas about responsible citizenship that are instilled in America's youth.Less

The Burdens of Aspiration : Schools, Youth, and Success in the Divided Social Worlds of Silicon Valley

Elsa Davidson

Published in print: 2011-08-22

During the tech boom, Silicon Valley became one of the most concentrated zones of wealth polarization and social inequality in the United States—a place with a fast-disappearing middle class, persistent pockets of poverty, and striking gaps in educational and occupational achievement along class and racial lines. Low-wage workers and their families experienced a profound sense of exclusion from the techno-entrepreneurial culture, while middle-class residents negotiated both new and seemingly unattainable standards of personal success and the erosion of their own economic security. This book explores the imprint of the region's success-driven public culture, the realities of increasing social and economic insecurity, and models of success emphasized in contemporary public schools for the region's working- and middle-class youth. Focused on two disparate groups of students—low-income, “at-risk” Latino youth attending a specialized program exposing youth to high-tech industry within an “under-performing” public high school, and middle-income white and Asian students attending a “high-performing” public school with informal connections to the tech elite—the book offers an in-depth look at the process of forming aspirations across lines of race and class. By analyzing the successes and sometimes unanticipated effects of the schools' attempts to shape the aspirations and values of their students, the book considers the role schooling plays in social reproduction, and how dynamics of race and class inform ideas about responsible citizenship that are instilled in America's youth.

Competition around U.S. college admissions, particularly at the most selective colleges and universities, has never been greater, and recent research suggests that where one attends college matters ...
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Competition around U.S. college admissions, particularly at the most selective colleges and universities, has never been greater, and recent research suggests that where one attends college matters in terms of persistence, graduation, and future opportunities. In this high-stakes environment, parents and students in affluent secondary schools approach preparation for selective admissions as an “arms race,” seeking out opportunities and experiences to differentiate themselves from the rest of college applicants. Drawing upon ethnographic data collected from a purposefully selected tri-school sample of students, parents, and school personnel, Class Warfare peers underneath the “sacred moment” of the college admissions process, offering a worm's eye view of the day-to day and week-by-week struggles over class positioning as engaged by differentially located class and race actors in public and private privileged secondary schools in early 21st century United States. The college admissions process represents the culmination of intentionally waged “class work” that is linked to an envisioned battleground over forms of privilege represented by admission to particular kinds of postsecondary destinations. Class Warfare details the extent to which and the ways in which parents, school counselors, teachers, and students at three iconic, privileged, secondary schools in the United States work to “lock in” the next generation's privileged class status via the postsecondary admissions process, illuminating the ways in which sector of secondary school, student position in the opportunity structure of the school, and degree of parent/student closeness to the habitus embedded within particularly located privileged institutions shape “class work” and future class structure.Less

Lois WeisKristin CipolloneHeather Jenkins

Published in print: 2014-04-02

Competition around U.S. college admissions, particularly at the most selective colleges and universities, has never been greater, and recent research suggests that where one attends college matters in terms of persistence, graduation, and future opportunities. In this high-stakes environment, parents and students in affluent secondary schools approach preparation for selective admissions as an “arms race,” seeking out opportunities and experiences to differentiate themselves from the rest of college applicants. Drawing upon ethnographic data collected from a purposefully selected tri-school sample of students, parents, and school personnel, Class Warfare peers underneath the “sacred moment” of the college admissions process, offering a worm's eye view of the day-to day and week-by-week struggles over class positioning as engaged by differentially located class and race actors in public and private privileged secondary schools in early 21st century United States. The college admissions process represents the culmination of intentionally waged “class work” that is linked to an envisioned battleground over forms of privilege represented by admission to particular kinds of postsecondary destinations. Class Warfare details the extent to which and the ways in which parents, school counselors, teachers, and students at three iconic, privileged, secondary schools in the United States work to “lock in” the next generation's privileged class status via the postsecondary admissions process, illuminating the ways in which sector of secondary school, student position in the opportunity structure of the school, and degree of parent/student closeness to the habitus embedded within particularly located privileged institutions shape “class work” and future class structure.